I recently received a call to repair a laptop, from a lady in Llanberis. The laptop had shut down the day before and now wouldn’t turn on. After taking a look at it, I found that the charger was faulty and the battery had simply run out of power. Once the new charger arrived, all was well again. The process of diagnosing this kind of fault is straightforward and in this post I’d like to share some simple troubleshooting you can do before calling in the experts. Read more ›

I was recently asked by a gentleman in Llanberis to take a look at his laptop as the screen was displaying strange colours. Upon starting the machine it was found to have inverted colours – what should have been red came out as green and the whites came out as a pale blue. There was also some splotches of pink dotted around the screen. Read more ›

Anything that makes re-installing your operating system easier is a good thing in my book. Ninite is a web-based tool that allows you to download and install your favourite apps with the absolute minimum of fuss. You select the applications you want and Ninite creates a custom installer which then runs with no further input necessary. The toolbars and other junk that some programs come with are de-selected by default and it’s free for personal use.

Recently, I was asked by a lady in Llanberis to fix an all-in-one printer/scanner which wasn’t working, a Lexmark X1180. It was powered on, the USB cable was connected and worked and the printer appeared under ‘Printers’ in Vista. After some puzzlement and deliberation, I found that the supplied drivers disc was intended for use only with XP. Even though they seemed to work, whenever a test page was sent to the printer an error message appeared. Read more ›